Historical Gaslighting of Emotional Experience

They say therapy is about healing.

But for many of us, it starts with being seen—

Before we even know how to name what we’re carrying.

We don’t talk enough about how therapy gets framed.

We whisper it. Apologize for needing it.

We show up with proof that things are “bad enough.”

As if pain needs permission.

As if collapse is the only way care is justified.

I almost didn’t go.

I told myself I was just tired.

That other people had it worse.

That lucky person don’t ask for help.

And when I did go, I softened myself.

I joked.

I told my story like a case study.

Because we’re taught:

To be taken seriously, your pain has to be legible.

Manageable. Beautiful.

But the room was still.

No rescue.

No performance.

Just the mirror of your own voice

and what it avoids.

Therapy didn’t hand me answers.

It handed me a pattern.

And the grief that followed—

when I realized how long I’d been reenacting the same pain

in different rooms, with different people.

Some people love us more

when we’re quietly breaking

than when we begin to hold our shape.

That’s why this work is dangerous.

Not because it’s messy—

but because it’s clear.

I thought therapy would fix me.

It didn’t.

It brought me back to the version of myself

I’d left behind to survive.

And I’m no longer pretending

that coping is the same thing as being okay.

✍🏽 Author’s Note

I wrote this piece not to explain therapy, but to speak honestly about what it can uncover, especially for those of us taught to survive by staying silent, small, or emotionally polished.

This isn’t a story about breakthroughs. It’s about what happens when we begin to unlearn who we had to become to stay safe. The work is slow. Sometimes still. Often uncomfortable. But it’s real.

This is part of an ongoing archive: Dead Mic Society — The Sessions—a series of poems and reflections about care, survival, silence, and the emotional labor we rarely name out loud.

If this resonated, I invite you to sit with it. No urgency to respond. No pressure to resolve. Just space.

Dr. Natasha Charles McQueen